Eddie's Blog

This is my first blog post! How exciting. I recently ran a session of my Pathfinder 2nd Ed. campaign, and rather than getting to into my personal life, for this first post, I want to strike while the iron is hot, because I learned an important lesson recently.

The lesson I learned was the subtle art of shutting my mouth. Let me explain: I run my campaign in my own personal homebrew world called Adra (yes, if you are familiar, I stole the name for it from the name for the magical pillars from the excellent game, Pillars of Eternity ). I started working on this world back in 2018, and it has evolved considerably since then. I have written voluminous histories of ancient wars that have nothing to do with the campaign, I spent hours coming up with the weather patterns in the northern mountains, and I once created a flow-chart to understand the various power relations between various parts of the body politic of my Byzantine Empire analogue. Suffice it to say, I love my world, and this is usually a good thing. When a GM loves their world, the players feed off of it.

I would like to compare my relationship with my fictional RPG world to most authors' relationships with their own fictional book worlds. They, by and large, love the worlds they've created and written about in their books (my fiance is a fiction writer, and can confirm this). Imagine then that you are attempting to read a good book set in a really cool fantasy world, only the book's author is sitting over your shoulder, and can read your thoughts as you read the book. No doubt every time you reached some misunderstanding of the text, or came to a conclusion that seems impossible to the author, said author would be tempted to correct your misunderstanding (at least as long as they were as much of a control freak as I am). Imagine how awful reading a good book would be if every few seconds you were interrupted by an author telling you that you were wrong about what you make of the book. It would suck--it would take forever to read, you would be hardpressed to form your own unique relationship with the text, and you'd probably resent the author.

What am I getting at? Well, every session at my table is a bit like having that author over your shoulder reading your mind. I read my players minds--well, not my players, but effectively I read their characters minds, because the players share what their characters are thinking with me and with each other. And inevitably, as the players make plans, discuss what is going on, and pursue their goals, they say things that do not gel with my understanding of my world. The control freak I am, I cannot help but pipe up, "Well actually the Steppe Nomads aren't really at war or peace in the way that settled kingdoms would understand those terms..."

Now, to be clear, for the most part these kinds of interjections didn't seem to be completely unwelcome by my players. In fact, one player in particular seems to specifically try to bait me into revealing more lore about my world by saying things that are wrong on purpose! Nonetheless, I have come to realize that these interjections of mine do more harm than good. They interrupt the flow of the session, they may invalidate a player's vision of the world (which is basically as valid as mine), and most importantly, they take the conversation out of character. I have found that these interjections of mine seem to have the effect of forcing the conversation out of character, because the PCs couldn't possibly respond to me in character. I think over time, this can have a detrimental effect on RP in the game.

So, I'm quitting cold turkey! In my last session, I refrained entirely from interjecting with anything but mechanically necessary information. When players said things or made assumptions that I believed to be false, I fought the urge to correct them. And so far, it was a success. My strategy, beyond sheer force of will, is to attempt to provide that kind of information about the world or game through a point of view; in other words, I have an NPC tell the players what they think about the topic. This has the benefit of communicating to the players about the nuances of the world, while also no invalidating their own vision of Adra, since its just one NPC among many sharing their opinion. My second strategy is to take the information that I think is important in guiding them through any larger misunderstandings, and clearing that up at the start and end of sessions, rather than interrupting. This gets rid of the interupting flow problem, and the problem of forcing players to talk out of character, since the session isn't running at those moments (I might also take the time at the half-way break to do the same.)

So, I have implemented another lesson, and hope to keep practicing it. Strangely, I feel this is a case of a behavior becoming learned over time, and now having to correct for that behavior. I don't believe I used to do this as much years ago when I GMed, and it has seemingly gotten worse over the past couple years, until I realized I had to do something to address it.